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Google Launching Music Service Without Labels
fysdt writes "Google Inc is set to launch an online music locker service to allow users to store and access their songs wherever they are, similar to one launched by Amazon.com Inc in March. And like the Amazon Cloud Drive player, Google music service is being introduced on Tuesday without any prior licensing deals with major music labels, following months of fruitless negotiations."
So where's Apple now? Every big player should launch their service right now. It's way harder for the music industry to fight back then.
from old media, over me accessing songs I own from wherever I am, or any device I have.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
Just because it's Google, music labels won't let a piece of the pie to go to waste. Sadly.
So they have no licensing deals, but its still US only? If they are basically following the strategy that it is easier to ask for forgiveness then permission, why not do it the world over?
This is a smoking gun to any pirated or "borrowed" music in your collection. Let the subpoenas begin! Or, you can leave the music at home and use something like Subsonic, which provides almost all the functionality of GMusic ... the client just needs some love and polish.
As I understand it, iTunes Store offers no streaming rentals (unlike Rhapsody) or hosted locker (unlike Amazon).
there be a shitstorm a brewin in the sea of google.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...If Google becomes the label. If Google can do what MySpace succeeded at, which is become the home for small artists, Google may be onto something. They can go a step further and become the label, offering video and audio hosting, a store and perhaps even CD printing through suppliers. Bands would upload to Google rather than MySpace or with an independent label. It would be a natural extension to the service provider portfolio, Picassa, Docs, Voice, Apps etc.
If not, expect a legal creampie with only the lawyers (and the RIAA) profiting.
(Google lost the way but maybe they can claw back some? Either way, they're still evil.)
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
I already copied my favorite tunes to my Android phone and, since I carry it with me everywhere, I already have convenient access to my music wherever I am -- even if I don't have a 3G signal. Why would I want to move those files from my SD card to the cloud? So I can experience the frustration that goes with not getting a 3G signal at my work nor at my home? F that.
Apologies for this expression I just Googled it and regret my wording.
Just meant to imply it would be a massive orgy of corporate interests and expensive litigation.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
I can do the same right now with my iPhone and the Song Exporter Pro app...
Can other people see my music?
Then how will the RIAA know what I have there, what is the basis for the subpoena?
yar, there be drama afoot
From the system requirements : "The latest version of Adobe Flash Player must be installed and enabled in your browser (Flash is included with Google Chrome)."
So it's going to be a non-starter for a lot of devices including of course iOS devices but a lot of others too. So right of the bat they go out of their way to alienate literally millions of potential users. Not a good way to dive into a market that has a lot of big players going into it including Amazon and potentially Apple who are rumored, as they always are, to be working on something similar.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
If I'm missing something, please let me know because I just don't get this.
Google has launched a service that is controversial because it lets people store music they already own and then access it again? What possible "licensing" is there to discuss with the record companies? How is this even a "service"...it sounds like "storage" to me.
Only people with something to hide would hide something.
Hey this Koan thing is fun...
Nullius in verba
...What happened to Slashdot? The comments look... tiny! It no longer takes a fortnight just to load the comments, it looks a million times better, and it looks simpler to use as well!
2011: The year of Duke Nukem Forever, GNOME 3, and an actually sensible Slashdot comments system? Am I dreaming? Somebody pinch me!
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Patiently awaiting a clever hack that will allow storing any data there instead of just music. :)
Documents in MP3 wrapper? 50Gb free storage anywhere? Sweet
Hyperom.com
"We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States"
Just like Amazon and all the others. Of course, nothing else was to be expected...
Google has been negotiating with the music publishers and the negotiations were described as "fruitless." This can only mean that the music industry wanted payment for every time a user plays music that he already paid for and Google didn't want to allow it.
So, in the end, we will see this service become popular and the industry will challenge this in court initially seeking injunctive relief and eventually "performance royalties" among other damages.
I, of course, anxiously await the legal tangle. Google is a hero for many here on Slashdot for various reasons. I still see them as a marketing company with their own angle and interests at heart, but I do appreciate the fact they are willing to fight for their cause rather than simply roll over and pay people just to stay out of court.
Who do I speak to to get my music on this service? It's CC BY-NC-ND anyway, but I'd love to be able to reach more people.
So HERE is Simplify Media, suberb program while is lasted! Now who can get me a invite for the living beings outside the US of A?
Red een boom, Eet een bever!
Will they use tags instead?
Can other people see my music?
Then how will the RIAA know what I have there, what is the basis for the subpoena?
Also, how will the RIAA know when you obtained the pirated music? The statute of limitations clock in many cases is pinned to the last infringing act - so not only would they have to prove you had the files and obtained the music files through copyright infringement, they would have to prove that they were still inside the statute of limitations (three years for civil suits, five for criminal), which means proving you downloaded the music or shared it with someone else during a specific period of time.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Sorry but I have never heard of these "music labels", what are they? Does that have anything to do with the ID3 in the mp3? If so ID3 data indeed does have to be better coordinated, too many mp3's are mislabeled with completely wrong ID3 data. Multible song and lyrics versions and lyrics .lrc syncrhonization is just a complete mess because there is no proper ID3 data standards, especially when it come to multiple versions of the same song by the same artist. Perhaps by putting it all in a cloud and comparing it we can choose the best versions of mp3's, ID3, and .lrc. Though somehow I think the RIAA is going to want to police and see receipts for everyone's cloud music data storage.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
If you look at the Amazon EULA it squarely transfers the liability to the customer. One would assume Google would do the same thing. The customer attests they have the legal right to store and stream the music in "teh Cloud".
So if iOS does X and Android doesn't, it's "Apple is better because it does X." Now that Android does X it's "so what? Apple already does X." As long as Android can't do it, it's a horribly deficiency, but as soon as Android can do it it's no big deal.
I wonder if the same "logic" will apply to the app stores. Up until now every time an Android story comes up someone posts about how "it's the apps stupid" and goes on about how iOS is the best because it has the most apps. Well Android passed iOS in the number of free apps last month, and is expected to pass iOS in the total number of apps sometime later this year. When that happens will the same people who were arguing that it was the number of apps that mattered switch to some other argument? (Presumably that although iOS has less apps, its apps are better?)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Amazon/Google/etc. has to convince people to leave all the music that they may have purchased in a protected format
Whether that's an easy sell or hard sell depends on how many people used iTunes Store for the first time after the first quarter of 2009, when Apple introduced DRM-free "iTunes Plus" music downloads.
So they want me to declare how many MP3 people illegally downloaded from the net? I may sounds trollish but some those files might have been watermarked by their right holders. Sorry if I won't use that service.
Ooh! I do! I want to see Google vs the **AA and affiliates! Nice and drawn out!
Then we can make a movie about it! It will be free with signup to Gmail!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So you want me to put my mp3s(I hope) in the cloud. Will you provide useful features beyond a simple store, like automatic synching to my phone and PC? Will you let me use multiple accounts from anywhere like Steam, or will you lock it down to a single account per computer like BNet? Will you let me add my own files to my library like Steam or will it be limited to purchased offerings from Google like BNet?
Basically will you create something new and dangerous to the old publishers that will corner the marketshare, or will you create an also ran with the features that are safe for publisher control to be maintained?
Even if Google does have the financial resources to acquire a controlling interest in Sony, Vivendi, EMI, and WMG, doing so would raise red flags to competition regulators in multiple countries.
The statute of limitations clock in many cases is pinned to the last infringing act - so not only would they have to prove you had the files and obtained the music files through copyright infringement, they would have to prove that they were still inside the statute of limitations (three years for civil suits, five for criminal), which means proving you downloaded the music or shared it with someone else during a specific period of time.
You clearly made a copy when you put it on this new Google Service so that would be the most recent infringement date. Not only did you make a copy, you clearly distributed it (albeit to yourself).
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
At 160 kbps m4a/ogg, music takes 72 MB per hour, and a 16 GB phone can hold over 200 hours of music. How many CDs worth of music is "very extensive"?
It's odd that a web company like Google would deliberately limit its service like that when using pure HTML5 technologies would have provided a much larger potential audience
HTML5 relies on the codecs present in the end user's web browser. Browsers included with an operating system support only patented MPEG codecs; other browsers support only Free codecs. Do you expect Google to transcode all uploads between Vorbis and AAC?
But I'd be willing to bet that the RIAA lawyers can convince a judge that putting the music on this service is actually sharing it (with yourself) and therefore constitutes the latest infringing act.
The real question would be in this case how could they tell if the music was pirated or just a copy you ripped yourself?
There is music tax imposed on cds, mp3 players/any blank media.
Is our sky safe and tax free?
I want in!! pm me if you have spare invites, I really want to try this.
We should have been
So much more by now
Too dead inside
To even know the guilt
Back when .MP3s were cutting edge and 'ripping' a CD took actual effort. 10-12 years ago (maybe longer). People used to say how evil the recording companies and 'labels' were. And how MP3s were going to change that. The internet was going to change that.
Anyone can make music now and share it with the entire world. This has been trivially easy for at 8 years. Virtually no cost at all. You can just record, upload and share.
But what came of it? Nothing. Not a thing.
As it turns out, there is something to be said for the recording industry. In spite of what hipsters and edgy teens say, they still spend the bulk of their money on mainstream crap produced by the very same people they claim to hate. All the while, saying how 'crappy' it is.
RIAA> ok, here's the deal, you gotta help us sue everyone that uses bittorrent. we are sure some of them are stealing music.
Google> that's kinda against our mantra of dont be evil.
RIAA> yeah, that's the other thing, that's the first thing to go.
Google> umm... no.
RIAA> clearly you are harboring pirates! see you in court!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No Text Needed - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Is it too optimistic to expect eventual integration with major CC-licensed online music hubs?
well...many of us have albums that are less than 3/5 yrs old!
"We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States", no further comment.
For legal reasons, certainly... Pandora removed access from Europe as well quite a while ago.
Why don't we have timeshare music ?
That would be to help musicians bypass labels. Seriously, if companies like Amazon, Google, and apple were to work together to provide support to MUSICIANS, they could convince them to leave the labels and get the vast majority of the money for themselves. The labels are the real issue here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Excuse my ignorance, by I fail to see how this is any different from using any other Cloud based storage service to store your data and files. You can store you mp3s with Dropbox and then use any app that supports it to access and play that music. Isn't this pretty much the same thing?
Does anybody remember mp3.com's initial launch in the late 90s? It was essentially a "cloud music" service over a decade ahead of its time. You didn't actually upload mp3s, but it would scan the CD in your CD-Rom drive, presumably do something like match the CDDB info, then those mp3s would be in your account, freely downloadable from any internet-connected computer. People would share music collections by using each others' passwords and downloading all the mp3s in each others' accounts, it was a cool time on the internet frontier! Short lived though.. I seem to remember them getting a cease-and-desist not 6 weeks after I started using it, and soon afterward they reinvented themselves into an early incarnation of whatever they are right now.
You clearly made a copy when you put it on this new Google Service so that would be the most recent infringement date. Not only did you make a copy, you clearly distributed it (albeit to yourself).
...which you're allowed to do, so no, it's not infringement.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
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The /. crew has been cracking down on your ability to post weird rants? Poor guy... :)
So I can't access it outside the US. Not exactly "WHEREVER"!!!
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
I for one would love to have an online music service that lets me upload my (large) existing collection of CD's (preferably with a "virtual" upload so I don't have to actually transfer the same bits to google that they already have)
After the last "virtual" upload provider was defeated in a U.S. court (UMG Recordings v. MP3.com), the labels would probably charge a service provider more for "virtual" upload than a service provider can afford.
I'll also have access to my music through my 3G (LTE?) enabled car stereo at some point
With what monthly transfer cap?
The Stream is a Lie.
Suppose you could buy songs for a penny. Great! $25 and you're set for a week/month.
Then when more silly corporate games go on, you have "a better chance" at keeping what you own rather than "what they feel like offering".
Minor Example, cross genre.
Hulu removes series series from availability. So what makes you think stuff you want will always be available?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...To "Kick Evil In The Balls"
...which you're allowed to do, so no, it's not infringement.
I don't think it is quite as clear as you are asserting. Fair use may allow you to make a backup copy of your CD or purchased MP3, but it might not allow you to put that back up copy on a remote web server for the purpose of streaming across the internet. The only way we'll find out is after someone gets sued and tries to defend it. Google probably isn't going to get sued in the first round, the users will. If it becomes established that using the service is infringing then Google might get sued.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
"We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States"
Oh well, will have to stick to the distributed backup systems then, arrrg.
The inevitable legal battles are going to be hilarious when defense lawyers start forcing RIAA et al to pick apart the exact technical differences between local and remote playback. In the end all playback is streaming, whether it's from a local hard drive or a remote locker.
So it's ok to stream from a local hard drive but not a remote one? Why? Is it a protocol issue? What protocols are ok? If streaming over SATA is ok, would it be ok if Amazon strung a SATA cable from their hard drive to my house? What about SATA over USB? What if I encapsulate SATA in TCP/IP, is that ok? If yes then why not HTTP? RTSP? Custom protocol? They're going to have to nail down exactly what is and isn't acceptable and the answer will be ridiculous.
For deduping, they don't seem to like bypassing hashing, Dropbox style. What about other hashing methods? What if the user uploads the data and it's deduped by the server? If that's no good, what about filesystem-level deduping? Filesystems can easily make it seem like blocks are duplicated when in fact they are not. Is it illegal to store an MP3 on such filesystems?
Fun times ahead folks :D
Yes, they'll be missing out on a lot of older talent. But it's pretty obvious that record companies are more comfortable telling you what you want to listen to instead of trying to discover new talent.
Google has youtube... the amount of talent on there is ridiculous... they just have to sign people like this.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5WB-p-QBJc
And you're right; these services are a great test of fair use. I think fair use pretty clearly encompasses streaming on the internet for personal use, especially if the CD itself is unused at the time. Bear in mind, it's up to the RIAA to prove infringement on their copyright, not for the individual to prove compliance. If you're making exclusive use of the product you purchased, where exactly is the infringement?
From the RIAA website, copying music from CDs to computers and portable music players is okay provided:
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
since it's Google that would be distributing it, they would have to go after Google.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If a user has the music on their local system anyway, legally obtained or otherwise. What difference would it make uploading it to some online storage for their own use? Either way, they are never likely to pay for it, the labels don't really have anything to gain from chasing Google. If it was some music sharing service like Grooveshark then I could see the problem, but it's really not. It's an online 'private' music storage drive. You could do the same thing with Google Storage for Developers and some neat apps and nobody would ever know.
But Google isn't distributing anything in an infringing manner. They're simply storing files that the users upload, and allowing those same users to download only what they've uploaded. This is the fight the RIAA is going to have to fight, and Google and Amazon are clearly confident that they'll win it in court.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
The statute of limitations clock kicks in when somebody first discovers you have committed an illegal act at some point in the past. From that point on, they have the option of actually having you charged or not for the duration of the limitation statute. It has nothing to do with when the act itself was actually committed.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
But I'd be willing to bet that the RIAA lawyers can convince a judge that putting the music on this service is actually sharing it (with yourself) and therefore constitutes the latest infringing act.
The real question would be in this case how could they tell if the music was pirated or just a copy you ripped yourself?
I'll take that bet.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Okay - for the sake of argument, say they discover when I sign up for Google Music that I have a trove of music that I allegedly downloaded off of Napster back in 1999.
They then have to prove the allegation that I obtained it by infringement. This, of course, would have to be proven by evidence they obtained only after they discovered my collection - otherwise their claim to have discovered it from my Google Music account would be false. And who exactly is it that collected this evidence and then sat on it for twelve years? What was their motivation? Is their chain-of-custody unimpeachable, and can it be proven that the evidence was never given to the plaintiff prior to the discovery of my Google account? And even if all of that can be answered satisfactorily, why were they collecting evidence of copyright infringement if my alleged infringement wasn't discovered until twelve years later?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Oh, no, I wasn't arguing any of that, it's just that a lot of people are confused on how statute of limitations works so I was just clearing that up. Cheers, mate.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
D'oh! (For the record, I actually did find that distinction while I was looking up the SoL's for my first post, but it was always in the context of "in practice, it's from the date of the latest infringement.")
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Shit, back in the day, I could buy eight tapes, 10 LP's, or 12 8-tracks for just one penny!
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Potato slurry is blog stanley; raptor towel dissociates petrol
The music industry executives are all jewish, just like the Hollywood movie industry tycoons are. Google founders are also ethnic jewish, just like Facebook. We, the non-jewish "goyim" nations, whom the Talmud declares subhumans and animals, should not worry at all about jews robbing each other. The problem is when the jews start suing, because they are so cunning and tricky, the misled court will eventually punish the goyim with fines and prison. Beware of Shylock, he will sell you a bridge with large interest rates!
Every major company that launches a music service is a step closer to a meltdown of the copyright monopoly.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
for $deity's sake mod parent up
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I'm not sure what interaction benefit the 'click to open parent' gives.
It encourages the user to read the comment in context before replying to it.
What ever happened to this high falutin philosophy of theirs!
Sincierly,
MAFIAA
same thing happened several years back when a high-end company sought to market a DVD-jukebox for home use. It recorded the DVD the first time you played it onto a hard disk and afterwards, allowed you play it back without the DVD. The units were very expensive -- so not much chance of them proliferating and being used to mass-pirate media. Nevertheless, the MPAA sued them and won -- saying that the device circumvented the copy-protection on a DVD (which was bull, but the judge ruling on the case was either too stupid to realize this or was bought (or both)).
It's like companies, now, that offer software that allows you to copy or install a DVD, Blu-Ray, or Game Disc to your hard-disk so you can later play the content without playing disc-shuffle.
You still own the disc, but this is still considered illegal in the US due to corrupt courts and a corrupt legal system (purchased by the Corps). As long as you own the disc, you aren't doing anything ethically wrong, but the corrupt US legal system doesn't care about right/wrong anymore (hasn't for some time -- whoever has the gold makes the rules!). But the Corps would rather you pay again and again for each device. The entire ipod/iphony ilk are predicated on people being too stupid/too lazy to rip their own music to their pods because the software isn't convenient enough due to corrupt-US-law interference.
If that law wasn't in place, people could have their music one place -- likely on a home music system, quite possibly PC based for most people, that would have multiple attachments to distribute it to all the devices in their home.
I imagine the day I'll be able to buy a CD and rip it to my computer and have it automatically be copied to my car player and my phone -- automatically, so I can have my latest tunes anywhere. But right now, such a convenience would be a hard-hacked kludge. Thank-you, corrupt US-legal system!
I'm sure other countries will innovate such conveniences, but they won't allowed for sale in the US market -- but for better or worse, with the US's economy going down the tubes and most of its people having their total wealth measure in the bottom 10-20% of the market, the US market won't be considered that important.
Tried to check it out last night.
Why does Google hate Canadians?